Say Goodbye to Sanding Swirls: Tips & Techniques for a Flawless Finish!

so Sher I got a h question for you one of the U biggest questions that we probably had most common question here at iwf L 2024 was uh swirls I mean I had people coming up to me saying how do you eliminate Swirls and you know what causes Swirls and so can you kind of like go over um and give us you know a little bit of information what causes them and then how to resolve them yeah sure Chris most of the time swirls are caused by either over sanding or shoving down on the sander or unfortunately the 3x4 sander a lot of times the 3x4 sander will leave swirls in the center panel the easiest way we have found to get them out is that a 3x4 unolon maroon non-woven pad on the 3x4 sander and we it'll actually mask it and it won't change a color right so we have some swirls on a maple door right here what caused those swirls well we were just sanding with a uh 3x4 sander and when we go in a lot of times you'll see it [Music] vibrate that's a lot of swirls right there yeah the biggest problem is with the 3x4 it is a 3mm direct drive orbit and so it tends to catch the wood and Skip and hold on and it causes swirl more on a random orbital sander it's a little bit more um appeasing to the wood and it's usually that's usually when you see swirls from the three from the 5 in when they are either shoving down on the sander over sanding or you know the sand the the Sanders's lagging in air right so I noticed you were using uh ecostorm abrasive right there that's a paper abrasive yes are there abrasives that are less likely to cause uh swirls no not really not with the 3x4 you can use the interface pad or a pad saver it will reduce the amount of swirls but it's not going to stop the swirling unfortunately just it's indicative of this SW this sander so once you get swirls in the wood like this you'll be you definitely want to eliminate them before staining right absolutely and so what can we do what can we put on the sander to eliminate those the maroon nonwoven unon PR pad it has a hook and loop backing it will not work on the 5 in if you put it on the 5 in the random pattern will actually cause swirls but on the 3x4 because it is a direct drive system it will actually take the tops off the Swirls and you don't see them in your stain right and it doesn't change the color of your stain and that's big right so you can't take any of the abrasives and sand it out you would generally if you start sanding with another coated abrasive you just put more swirls in right you can work it up through different grits but the more you sand the more swirls you're going to put in I find there's just a breakthrough period where you start to swirl you you need to stop there because if you don't it's just going to continue to swirl up so now with all these swirls right there I would just put on that um maroon um you what it was called a unon unolon and I would just put that on and begin sanding with that Y and you would go over it with the 3x4 sander and it would take your swirl so even as bad as those swirls are I would just use that to get rid of it yeah so we can take um put some an ecostorm hat on here see if we can create some swirls on this painted door CU we do a lot of painted surfaces and stuff so so so there we go didn't take long to create some swirl so now that we got some swirl say on this painted surface if I'm going to be doing a primer or even a top coat over the top of this you know prior to coating it how am I going to eliminate these squirrels on a coated surface I with painted surfaces I can get the swirls out on the painted surface with a uh ecosilk plus 10 mm and generally I go with very fine so very fine 10 mm this is a close cell sponge so I can just sand those out yes that definitely eliminated them yes so that's the 10 mm close upell sponge and that is the very fine sponge so that did an excellent job it actually sanded them out super fast right I did sand down you know just some bare wood so I definitely would want to Prime that so um so we had two different scenarios we have a wood scenario and then we've got a painted scenario is there that's probably pretty pretty much the entire yeah that's pretty much the entire tety of that and the unon is really going to uh it'll it really works on the wood real well um I think we got there's a unon just no it went missing too oh that pack of them went missing the whole Pack's missing oh my gosh there you have it you've heard it from Sherry how to eliminate swirls how to stop swirls if you have any other scenario situations where you've got swirls where you need eliminate them uh stop them if you got any questions just leave it down in the question section below either one of us would love to help you out